A season in Hell

Words are the wellspring of all treachery.
Through this language of form is forged a world of
sensuous wonders combining real and unreal
in visionary and hallucinatory projections,
Like a child in all knowing wonder, who is
at once whole and perfect, shattering this reality
with the first utterance of a single syllable.

So all worlds are created, described and destroyed,
A deluge of metamorphoses, theater, magic and fairyland
Fantastic voyages, suffering and flood like clarion bell, forged on
the anvil of the first primordial word that gave existence its birth
And plunged it headlong into its own destruction.
Long before the great towers of men soared into the skies,
Poets made poignant confessions and dramatic narrative
to adapt this reality to another beginning, from darkness into light.

Oh the painful conceit of this! The desperate clinging
of the soul to its mother tongue; Would that the wordsmiths had
fashioned an ark that traveled not forward,
but back, back from the light and into darkness.
Deep in the wells of echoing timelessness
the universes were fashioned here,
Not by their words, but in silence.

America

I saw this image in a magazine, or part of it. The ad in the magazine had a room full of couches, throw pillows, lamps and end tables, and behind it all was this wall. I saw the flag in it immediately. I reminded me of the encaustic white flags of Jasper Johns. I knew I wanted to paint it. I love the texture of the brick, the warmth of the ocher and sienna leaking out behind the white paint. I love how the paint attempts to "sanitize" the brick, to make it look new or renewed. But really the texture is louder than the paint. I love the wall and the window that looks out into nothing behind the wall, as if all the substance is in the wall and everything else is just window dressing. I want to paint this painting again and again, trying to recapture the different textures of each individual brick, or maybe a new painting of nothing but brick and more brick, or brick and wood panel. I want to do this partly because painting is a lot like building a brick wall, one piece at a time, slowly building up layers, layers that both reveal and conceal. I like the idea of this painting hanging on a wall somewhere, hiding the space behind it like a wall, while revealing the textures, the materials the substance of the wall that it hides, brick, mortar, paint. I call this painting America, mostly because it reminds me of how this country is built, putting up walls and tearing them down, layer after layer, century after century, one brick at a time.

The Dead

I think most of my “great thoughts” occur to me in the car. I don’t know if this is because I spend more time in the car than anywhere else, or if it is because I am usually alone in the car, or if my car, by virtue of being a piece of shit, rattles and jiggles me into an hypnotic state wherein I am one with the universe. Regardless, when I am in my car, the idea factory is open.

A great example of this happened to me the other day. It was morning, that much I can tell you. Most likely I was on my way home after having dropped the kids off at school. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful morning, when all of a sudden the idea hit me. I was dead.

Now before I go any further, I want to make sure you understand me. I don’t mean the “I am dying, we are all dying” I am dead. It reminds me of the line from the movie Fight Club. "Narrator: In the Tibetan philosophy, Sylvia Plath sense of the word. I know we're all dying. But you're not dying the way Chloe back there is dying." Also, I don’t mean the “what is the point, I am better off not having lived” kind of dead. What I in fact mean is that I am I dead, literally dead, not dead, walking on the earth like a zombie dead, but that I am dead, “walking around in the afterlife and I just became aware of it” kind of dead.

Now, like most ideas that I have in the car, this one is kind of far fetched. Probably due to road hypnosis and the like. But I have to admit that the idea was not an unpleasant one, and that having had my so-called “realization” I felt quite comfortable. In fact, I felt at peace.

If I am dead, and this is the afterlife, then really the afterlife isn’t all that bad. I mean, apart from the occasional ups and downs, the mood swings, the minor tantrums, the drama and such, for the most part, life, er... death, is good.

Aside from feeling liberated, it is a funny thing to think of yourself as dead, that life as we know it is really the afterlife. Clichés abound about how life is what you make it and the kingdom of heaven is now. It reminds me of movies like Jacob’s Ladder, where the main character is haunted throughout the movie, only to realize in the end that he is actually dead. By way of explanation of the plot, the movie quotes the German mystic Meister Eckhart "The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you; they're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and. you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth."

I think that this is a profound way of talking about pain that has echoes in Buddhism, namely that suffering is not caused from without, but by our attachments. The big difference of course being that Eckhart is talking about the soul’s journey after death, and the Buddha is talking about the individual’s journey through life. Though truth be told, I personally see very little difference between the two. What does it matter if we think of ourselves as alive or dead? It reminds me of the exchange between Gandalf and Pippin in the Movie the Return of the King:

Pippin: I didn't think it would end this way.
Gandalf: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path... One that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass... And then you see it.
Pippin: What? Gandalf?... See what?
Gandalf: White shores... and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
Pippin: [smiling] Well, that isn't so bad.
Gandalf: [softly] No... No it isn't.

I have to admit, as I was typing my blog post on the Book of Jonah, I flinched when I admitted that I sometimes despair to the point of contemplating death as an escape, but it is equally true that I harbor a fear of death and the unknown and that those two feeling are very much at odds with one another.

I was listening to a Radiolab episode on the radio the other day as the described the action of a man who made the decision to jump off a bridge; I think it was the Golden Gate Bridge, to end his own life. Mid jump, he said, he realized he had made a terrible mistake. The announced later commented that of the twenty-four or so people out of one thousand that actually survived the same fall, almost all unanimously confirmed the same experience, namely that the desire to live was rekindled in the act of falling. I wonder, of the nine hundred and seventy-six that died, how many had the same experience but we not as lucky?

Anyway, back on point. I don’t think that I obsess about death, or that my musings on it are unnatural. Quite the contrary, the more I think about it, the less power it has over me. If I imagine myself as already dead, that I am strolling though the afterlife, death no longer seems like an option, as an escape from my suffering, nor as a thing to be afraid of. As Pippin said, “that isn’t so bad.” The torments I face are really the ones of my own making, and not the unknown that looms in the future.

I kind of like this thought, as odd as it is, a kind of Egyptian "the afterlife is a parallel of this life" kind of thing. Though without Pharaohs and Sphinxes and such. I don't believe I could walk around pretending I was dead all the time, but when I think about it, and stare out my window in to the wide world beyond, it puts a little quirky smile on my face and I chuckle to myself, and then I go on about my day.

What is this thing to you?

Is there anyone that doesn’t know the story if Jonah, particularly that part in which Jonah is swallowed by a great fish? I thought that I did. I have read the story several times in the last thirty years, and yet as we talked about the story in my adult Sunday school class last week, I found myself marveling over passages that seemed entirely new to me.

At the end of the story of Jonah, the Assyrian people repent, and turn to God, who in turn forgives them. Jonah’s response? He throws a fit. “I knew you were going to do that” he says, “ I knew you were going to forgive them. What was the point of my coming here if all you were going to do was forgive them?” He sits down outside the city and fumes.

Some people might me mystified by Jonah’s behavior. I think it is interesting that I never really took great notice of it. Probably because it was too close to home as this is where many of my conversations with God begin. “What was the point of that?” Just like Jonah I become incalcitrant. I can see myself in Jonah’s shoes. Frustrated, he is so overwhelmed with emotion that he is no longer able to talk with God. JoHe goes and sits outside the city wall in the burning desert sun and prays for death.

I am no stranger to this response. It is not uncommon for me, faced with some difficulty, or having felt some offence, to shut down the rational part of my mind. I become fixated on the swelling tide of emotions that churn within my body and I am incapable of offering defense on my own behalf. Furious at my own impotence as much as any perceived offence I may find myself acting out or saying something inappropriate that only worsens my situation. I am not above praying for release, even death, in these moments.

God’s response to Jonah is equally interesting. He causes a plant to sprout and grow overnight until it is large enough to shade Jonah. I imagine this plant like one of the trees you see in a Dr. Seuss book, long and gangly and multicolored. Jonah, the passage says, likes the plant, and enjoys the shade.

In yet another twist, God kills the plant, and here is where the story ends, or almost. Jonah becomes incensed, and God, seeing Jonah’s anger says to him “what was this plant to you? You did not plant it, you did not raise it, it was not yours, and yet when it dies you are angry. How much more are the people of this city, lost and confused, than this plant to which you owe nothing?”

The book ends on the question, and does not offer an answer. It appears as though it is the reader, and not Jonah, who is asked the question and expected to make an answer. Why are you angry? What is this thing to you?

The author is silent.

Take my class

This year the adjunct faculty had an assignment, write a short email answering the question "What do I want my students to walk away with?" In the absence of anything else to blog about, I thought I would share my thoughts with you...

Over the years I have had the random former student email me telling me they saw this or that painting, and that they were able to identify it because of my class. However I really sincerely doubt that the majority of my students, even the best, would be able to do this within weeks of taking my class. I don't want to sound mean, thought I know it sounds jaded, but simply put, if it isn’t in their interest they are going to forget it, quickly.

This begs the question, why teach if they aren’t going to remember? To answer this question I want to share an anecdote that happened to me some years ago. As I was standing beside the copier, I was engaged in small talk with another professor from a different department. When I told him I taught Art he looked at me rather smugly and said, “So, what is Art?”

“Take my class.” I said.

The answer to this question, a question, incidentally, that opens the first paragraph of our textbook, is no small matter. Is it the work of art, the process the artist uses to create a piece, or the skill and craft of the artist themselves? Over the years I have come to believe that Art is a language, a language of the culture and the time in which it was created. To tell you what art is, I must first teach you to speak that language, understand its nuances and syntax, and then, versed in this language we can begin a cover the meaning of the question, “What is art?”

That being said, here are some of the things that I want my students to gain from my class:


1. That art is a lens though which we view culture.

2. That there is a specific language used to communicate how this lens functions.

3. That this lens will vary with time and place, and is unique to its own particular set of circumstances

4. That to use this lens we must first take of the lens of our own culture, or, as it were, peek around it as much as is possible.

5. That to learn this language, one must not only study images, but also ideas, history, other languages, and in short, other cultures.

In the end what I want to teach my students is how to approach art, I want to teach my students how to think about art, so that with this mindset, they can look at any work of art, and not just "Las Menias" or the "Arnofini Wedding Portrait", and walk away with a new found appreciation and understanding of the work that is in front of them.

Elizabeth Murray on my favorite painting

This is the American Artist Elizabeth Murray. It turns out she and I love the same painting. Actually a lot of what she says in this very short clip resonates with me. It makes me wish I had known her.




Excavation was done by William de Kooning in 1950. This painting is an example of de Kooning's complex and dense style. Like many Ab Ex artists of this time, de Kooning's painting reflects a synthesis of Cubism and Surrealism. You can claw your way though the images in this work, uncovering layer after layer of meaning (hence the title).

Did I mention I love my therapist?

“What do you think of when you think of a higher power?”
“Honestly?” I paused giving the question its full weight. “I think of nothing.” I could see she was searching my face for some emotional response. “Not a nihilist or atheist nothing, like 'there is nothing out there' kind of nothing. Rather it is more like a 'once you are a part of the all what is the difference between being part of everything and being part of nothing'…nothing.”
“What does this nothing look like to you, then?”
“You mean am I blissed out, living with angels and harps? No, probably not. But I suspect that given the alternative, being a part of this nothing is a helluva lot better than the alternative.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean a world full of opposites, good/bad, right/wrong, even earth/heaven. You know the idea of heaven is a little suspect, isn’t it. It is just another aspect of the same old thing. We are born, we live, we die, and then we go to heaven. Then, because we don’t know any better, or because that is the way it is, it starts all over again. I want off this cosmic merry-go-round. That is my idea of heaven.”
“So why not get off?”
“I would if I could.”
“Have you tried doing it in reverse?”
I paused and thought about this for a moment. “You had me right up until the end. What do you mean, doing it in reverse?”
“So, according to you, there is nothing, and the nothing is split into a universe of opposites.”
“Right. First there is the word, and the word is separate from the silence.”
“And then one is judged good and the other…”
“Bad.” I added with extra emphasis.
“Right, bad. And so it goes, opposites are created and values are given to each pair of opposites. One is good the other is bad.”
“I think I see what you mean.”
“So now you take it in reverse. You identify what opposites you give value judgments, and remove the values, without values there is no…”
“Difference?” I interrupt.
“Without, value judgments the differences fade, without differences, there is no opposite. In the end all you are left with is your nothing.”
“I don’t think it is as easy as that.” I add skeptically.
“Have you tried it?” She asked inquisitively.
“No.” I said matter-of-factly.
“Well then how do you know?”
“Every movement towards the divine takes an act of faith.” I say superiorly.
“Why don’t you try?” she said, patiently.
“I suppose I have nothing to lose.” I say with a bit of defeat.

Pantheon of Higher Powers

I flipped open an Al-Anon book this morning and the first sentence I read was “When we say higher power, initially people believe that we are speaking of a religious entity. We are not. We are speaking of a loving, caring, nurturing Power that provides us with guidance…” As I began thinking about this, I realized that, while I have always identified “Higher Power” with “God”, in truth a higher power is anything that I set over myself, a power that guides and directs me, and that while ideally this higher power is a nurturing, loving power, more often what I make my higher power is job, relationship, or love. I am easily distracted by these powers, and while I think my intentions are good, the “guidance” that I receive by chasing after them, often leaves me angry, lonely, and unfulfilled. Essentially I make all the petty, material, even mundane problems of my life that power that seizes my every thought, and I bow down to these idols with an all too frequent and familiar regularity.

Later I had the opportunity to talk about this thought with a friend. I pointed out that, the statement “Came to believe” held three solutions for overcoming my obsessions with these insignificant powers that hold so much sway over me. Recognizing them or “Came” was the first part. Recognizing that there is a force over which I am powerless is perhaps the most important part of making change.

The second, “came to” is the understanding that I have a significant role in choosing these powers and the way that they affect me. It is no accident that this or that power is able to possess my thoughts and emotions so powerfully. I am an active and willing participant in choosing what I call my higher power.

Finally, “came to believe” is the realization that while I sometimes think that I have given up hope believing that I will ever be able to do things differently, the truth is that I harbor faith that even if I am not able to do things differently, I believe that these things can and will change. I am not always able to name the source of this faith, or the object in which this faith is placed, but the fact that my desire for change exists, means that hope is not dead, and that I am willing to do whatever it takes to live my life differently.

In rereading this, so much of my thoughts seem nothing more than jargon pulled directly from countless Al-Anon meetings. I don’t know that I have made the fateful step of turning my will and my life over to some higher power that truly loves me and wants to nurture and guide me towards serenity. Instead what I am choosing to focus on is the idea that I don’t have one higher power, I have many, and that the dizzying array of higher powers are a pantheon of petty grievances, fears and insecurities that I am ready to name and turn over, because they no longer serve me, and I no longer wish to serve them.

The flower sermon

The Buddha saw a lotus blooming in the muddy water. Reaching down he pulled out the flower, stem and root and held it up high for his students to see. For a long time he stood there, saying nothing, just holding up the lotus and looking into the blank faces of his audience.

I reached my hand down between the rafters in my attic. Days before I had placed a trap among telltale dropping and the floorboards. The trap had snapped only the animal had fallen and I did not realize right way that the prey had been snared. Later, as the pungent odor began to waft down thought the cracks, I begin to understand the truth.

My hand was covered in a thick rubber glove surrounded by a trash bag. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it quick. I could feel the weight of it shift in my fingers. I snapped the bag shut around the maggoty corpse and hurried it, unceremoniously, to the trash bin outside.

Lying on the couch later I realized that I had fallen asleep. My eyes would flicker open periodically and catch the snippets of reality that flowed over me. In one moment I was lost in a fragment of dialogue from the television, in another I could hear my wife telling me she was putting the baby to bed, the children would come and go, sometimes poking me, other times trying to crawl in beside me. Finally, like Lazarus, I opened my eyes and stared into the slow circling blades of the ceiling fan, my hair damp with sweat.

Whenever I try to think about what to write next I can hear a faint tune. It comes from the back of my mind, playing as if through a broken speaker. Like the Velvet Underground song “heroin” played on a hurdy-gurdy, the tune is at once both familiar and foreign, comforting and disquieting. It is the music of the stars, an omnibus of sounds: music, prose and poetry. Moments of everyday life: seasons, moods, aspirations, dreams and stages of life.

The Buddha looks into the eyes of his followers. Meeting the gaze of his disciple Mahakasyapa, the disciple looked back and began to laugh. The Buddha handed the lotus to Mahakasyapa and said “What can be said I have said to you, and what cannot be said, I have given to Mahakashyapa.”

The Silent Crucible

Blaise Pascal said “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.” For myself, I think what he is expressing is that feeling that one gets when you loft a prayer to the almighty and find yourself sitting there, post communion, thinking “is anyone getting this?”

I imagine that, for anyone who prays, in moments of despair that have catapulted the faithful into prayer, there is inevitably a moment when one wonders, “when are my prayers going to be answered?” What follows is the long wait. Queue the Shirelles singing “the longest wait is right before dawn.” Long, because I am waiting for god’s will to align with my own.

These times are the most insidious, as there nothing but the waiting to support me. Consumed by my own impatience, I am plunged alternately into fear and insecurity. It is what St. John of the Cross calls, “the dark night of the soul.” Faulkner joked that it usually began around 3 a.m. It is a period of loneliness and isolation. It is a period of suffering, one that is the crucible of faith. I say this perhaps without really knowing what that means. My wife has a saying that “pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth.” For myself I try to avoid pain and suffering. When I am pain, all I can do is think about how I can get out of pain. If I have caused myself pain, all I can think about is chastising myself until I am sufficiently humbled. If someone else has caused me pain, all I can think about is how I can pay back the pain and suffering that has been visited on me. Pain, for me, when looked at in this light, seems like nothing more than the touchstone of selfish and self-centered thinking.

I think this is what Pascal is trying to express when he says that he is filled with dread. I think he knows that there is this great well of despair that forms from our own human propensity to be self-defeating and that this silence, unexamined, becomes the gulf between man and god, or even just between myself and my serenity. Pascal draws our attention to this that we should know the despair. In Buddhism the equivalent is found in a path called the sixteen stages of insight. Number six is “Knowledge of the fearful nature of mental and physical states” or more simply “knowledge of fearfulness.” The idea being that instead of recoiling from the fear, the pain and the uncertainty, there is a step that one must take in which we learn to just sit with these feelings. In knowing them we learn how to deal with them, so that when these feeling arise again, we know how to act, and not just react to our situation.

I don’t have to wait long to find these moments of pain in my life. Certainly I don’t have to wait for moments of prayer and meditation to feel isolated and alone. I can feel this way anytime, particularly when life isn’t going my way. I think about how often I can get irritated in a single day. How often do things not go my way, how many little infinite silences abut my sense of order? The other day, as I unfolded a bag of coffee beans, I several spilled on the floor. I cannot imagine how these beans leapt from the bottom of the bag and through the opening to find their way to the ground. My immediate reaction was one of frustration. Again I found myself waiting for the universe to align itself with my will. In that moment there is this terrible space that nothing can fill and so I fill it with frustration and even anger.

There are some things that I can control and other things that I cannot. I cannot, for example, control what you think and do. Ultimately the things that I can control fall to myself. I may not be able to control my feelings of sadness or fear, frustration or anger, but I can control how I react to them. I can learn to sit with them, or I can push them away. I might add again, just for arguments sake, that pushing these feeling away has typically lead me to selfish and self-centered thinking. However, having lived this way for a long time I find these reactions more and more distasteful, and while the thought of sitting in total discomfort is unappealing, the thought of alienating my sense of peace and calm is infinitely worse.

Leviticus-shmiticus

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 (L18/20) prohibit sexual intercourse between men. Opponents of same sex relationships frequently produce this passage as evidence that God forbids male/male relationships. The language of L18/20 occurs inside of the broader context of laws describing sexual unions that are prohibited or that are deemed “unclean.” These include adultery, incest, and bestiality.

To begin, I want to acknowledge that two thousand years worth of commentators have tried to understand and interpret these laws. So I am not sure what I, an untrained novice with out any legal or linguistic background, am going to have to offer this conversation. As far as I am concerned these laws were written to help govern an ancient people, the people and the culture for which these laws were written have passed. We no longer routinely slaughter cows and sheep as sin sacrifices. Nor do we put people to death for adultery. So it is a curious thing that people would look at these passages and use them to condemn homosexuality. Still I am curious about these passages and the power that they seem to hold over others; particularly because they seem to evoke such powerful and passionate responses, and so I want to understand them better.

On first glance I think anyone reading the two passages from Leviticus will see that there is something strange about them. It doesn’t say: “homosexuality is a sin.” It also doesn’t say that “men who engage in sexual acts with other men are sinners.’ What it does say, quite literally is “that a male shall not lay down with a man, as he would with a woman.” Noted scholar Saul Olyan notes that the verb usage here specifically references penetration (as for example the verb “penetrate” evokes a specific image) and that the prohibition seems to say that a person should not penetrate another man like he would a woman.

The language is bizarre, almost comical. “Don’t lay with a man is if he were a woman” seems to beg the question, well then should I lay with him as a man? Also, it make no reference to woman/woman relationships, and it seems to suggest that even in the confines of the male/male relationship, it is the penetrator and not the penetratee that is at fault. We might turn to other Jewish sources on law to compare but, unlike adultery, for example, there is no other parallel to be found in Jewish law that includes a prohibition on male/male couplings.

Historically commentators have suggested that the L18/20 passages have been included here either as a response to Egyptian or Semitic sexual practices deemed as impure or unholy by the Israelites. Another interpretation observes that the variety of sexual proscriptions are all non-procreative, that is they do not yield offspring, essential to the livelihood of an agrarian people and are as such and anathema. Both of these interpretations look at the groupings of laws collectively.

Another way of reading these laws is to look at them individually. The passages could been seen as having arisen independently of one another and were grouped together in Leviticus only later by their similarities of thematic content, in which case the meanings of these passages may not conform to a literary interpretation of the reading and may instead draw from a wide variety of traditions from an earlier history.

Did Israelites abhor male couplings, as has been generally assumed up to the present? There is the prohibition, but beyond this there is nothing to suggest that other homosexual acts, or even homosexual acts between women were taboo. Thus the evidence of the Hebrew Bible is insufficient to support the view that the Israelites discriminated against homosexuality. Such a generalization is more easily defended for adultery, incest, and human-animal couplings, all of which are prohibited in legal materials outside of Leviticus. But intercourse between males is mentioned in no other Israelite legal setting.

In all likelihood, no one contributing factor may explain the presence and meaning of these prohibitions in Leviticus. The more we try to understand one reading or another, for example that it is reaction to the practices of other cultures or that it is tied to notions or reproduction, the more it seems that these explanations, by themselves are not enough. It is helpful for me to imagine all of these factors, namely that first they arose out of separate and distinct traditions, that then they were eventually tied together thematically, and that in the final version someone at some point, probably in reaction to some perceived social stigma, went in and modified the code of law to level the most extreme punishments for certain types of behavior.

So then why is homosexual intercourse mentioned at all? Well if we try to break these saying down and look at them one at a time, we can begin to enfold the plethora of influences that have shaped these sayings and help us to understand their presence and their power within the context of Leviticus. In the first place, Lev. 18, it seems to be connected to a larger picture of purity laws in which the intermingling of semen causes one to become unclean. Leviticus 15:16-18 even goes so far as to suggest that heterosexual intercourse would make a man and a woman unclean for a time. Thus homosexuality is included in a litany of prohibited acts. In the second place, Lev. 20, the extreme nature of the extent to which homosexual penetration is condemned, namely death, is perhaps derived from the social taboos arising out of views of role reproductive acts and their importance for producing progeny.

Instead of asking why this was important to the Israelites, a better question might be why is it important to us? The idea that these laws should somehow govern or be connected with our own contemporary code of ethics, in my mind, is a mistaken association with an idea that arose in the 1950’s that homosexuality was aberrant behavior that arose from some mental defect, a psychosis perhaps, and that this stigma was associated with the reproductive stigma that appears in Leviticus. While the two are not the same and do not come from the same ideology, the passages in Leviticus are continually drawn out to support a lingering social prejudice.

Mr. Insecure

I have terrible insecurity when I write, I am sure that most writers do. The problem is that I am not a writer, I am a painter. But because I am an artist, I can appreciate what a writer, what a true wordsmith, goes through every time they sit down to work. When I write I have a subject in my head I want to tell you about. I go about my business of trying to supply details and when I am done I simply publish my thoughts. As a painter I do much the same thing, I stretch canvas over frame, I gesso, I begin to layer pigment until I am finished. The difference being that somewhere along the process of painting I can look at what I have done, and I know that it is ether going well or not, and more I can see the little inconsistencies, the areas that I need to work on, that need to flesh out and give more attention. That is not something I can do in writing.

The other night I was lying in bed with my wife. We were having one of those wonderfully intimate nights sharing ideas, talking about the day, kissing, and staring at each other till eventually time and the pressure of having children and the necessity of having to get up in the morning wore on us and we turned out the light.

Laying there in the darkness feeling my eyes adjust to the dim I began to feel the presence of crazy mind creeping in and taking over. I could see the images of unresolved conflicts, the stresses of daily life, work or even events of the past creeping in and at once I knew that I was in danger of going insane. My friend calls it monkey mind. I sat up, and not wanting to wake my wife, almost tripped trying to get out of the room. Minutes later she found me sitting on the couch. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Come to bed.”

In a daze I dumbly followed her and lying down again beside her she asked, “why did you leave?”

“I could feel my mind going crazy,” I said.

“Oh that?” Was her reply, “It usually takes me an hour every night to get past my mind and finally be able to settle into sleep.” I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t imagine trying to fall to sleep like that every night. “My trick” she continued, “if you want to call it that, is to try and name the voices that are speaking to you.” Lowering her speech she continued “Oh there is Mrs. Grumpy.” Then, her voice rising, “and there is Mrs. Insecure.”

“Her comes Mr. Unappreciated,” I said with a light chuckle.

“Oh sure” she said, “I know HIM.”

I lay there for a minute trying to decide which was better, trying to name the plethora of voices that were keeping me awake at night, or pacing up and down my living room trying to match them for strength and endurance.

“Mr. Insecure, Mrs. Self-loathing, Mr. Anxious, Mrs. Confused…” I drifted,

In a painting I can look at the surface, the texture of the paint, the color, the forms and usually know in an instant where I have gone wrong. Everything is simple in a painting, at least simple from the perspective of knowing where the proper place of things ought to be. In writing I have no idea. I stare at the words on the page, and if they seem to flow from the words on the tip of my thoughts I am usually satisfied, I have no great patience for writing. Things are better, I tell myself, if I just let them lie.

Fortunes favors...

I haven’t been blogging much and my blogging content is way down. Not that it was ever way up but I find it harder and harder to put two coherent thoughts together these days or even to find the time to sit down and try. Worse, I feel this strange, even unsettling feeling that I am out of sync with the universe right now. I was thinking about this the other day while watching a show on Pompeii. One of the things the program talked about was the Roman ideal of virtue. Romans didn’t measure virtue in terms of how good or how bad a person was, that is, with notions of sin. Rather, Roman virtue was tied to success. The virtuous person was the most successful. As Cicero said "Jupiter is called the best (Optimus) not because he makes us just or sober or wise, but because he makes us healthy, rich, and prosperous." Lacking prosperity, people would beseech the favor of the Gods, in hopes of increasing their chances for prosperity. One of the most prominent of these was Fortuna, the goddess of luck. People would beseech the goddess to help them become more successful in business, in politics and in war. In this way, good fortune, or luck was tied to deeds, labor and creativity. Signs of luck went hand in hand with talent, ingenuity and, of course, success. The question of luck was not individual, or personal as in “do you feel lucky” but relied on the preparedness of a whole, as in “fortune favors the prepared” or perhaps even “the lord helps those who help themselves.” As the goddess of fate Fortuna also had the power to foretell the future. This means that she was worshiped as an oracle and someone who could tell you how to proceed. Romans would sacrifice to her at the start of the New Year in hope for a prosperous year. This means that her power extended over the cycle of time and the changing of seasons. Fortune foretold the coming of an early spring or a late harvest, and knew the destinies of newborn children and grown-ups alike. As a goddess of action and deeds fortune is not an ephemeral force beyond our control, one that that steers the course of events towards us. Rather, we looked to fortune for guidance even as we proceeded forward. We tend to think of fortune now-a-days as something that happens to us, something good or bad. The difference between these differing views on fortune is that in one we take action towards fortune, in the other fortune is something that happens to us, like winning the lottery or finding a four-leaf clover. I think that I believe in both types of fortune, in some cases I have no manner of luck at all, in others I feel that fortune has somehow abandon me, rendering all of my efforts useless and futile. I find myself waiting for Fortuna to relent, like Toole writes in the Confederacy of Dunces: “Fortuna had relented. She was not depraved enough to end this vicious cycle by throttling him in a straitjacket, by sealing him up in a cement block tomb lighted by florescent tubes. Fortuna wished to make amends. Somehow she had summoned and flushed Myrna minx from a subway tube, from some picket line, for the pungent bed of some Eurasian existentialist, from the hands of some epileptic Negro Buddhist, from the verbose midst of a group therapy session.” Anyways, I am not really sure what any of this has to do with anything. As I said, I feel out of sync with the universe, so here I am musing on fortune, biding my time trying to figure out what action Fortune wants.

A Senate Page

When I was sixteen my father asked me a strange question. “Would you like to be a Senate Page?”
“Sure.” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about. But over the next few months it became more and more clear to me. Being a Senate Page meant that I was going to go and live in Washington D.C. I was going to work in the Capital Building, and go to school in a specially constructed classroom environment in the top floor of the Library of Congress.

My first days as a page were all about getting to know your environment, where you were going to live and who you were going to share your space with. I image it is much the same experience as someone going off to boarding school or summer camp. The only difference was that I was in the nations capital and was a federal employee working on the Senate floor.

The days were very long, though they varied a lot depending on whether or not the Senate was in session. Usually I got up around four thirty in the morning and went to school for a few hours. I was a junior in High School. All pages are. After school we went immediately to the Capital and began preparing for a days work. Dress was very formal, a blue suit and tie. Our duties might include running errands for the Senate staffers that manned the Democratic and Republican cloak rooms, set up of the Senate floor, that included laying out all the bills and amendments that were to be discussed, or doing secretarial work including answering calls and making copies.

As you might imagine the Capital is a building full of history, and everywhere you looked there were objects baring the marks of history, Davy Crockett’s desk or the Senate Gavel that was cracked by Richard Nixon. The people there were historic too. Among the Senators that I worked with were Strom Thurmond, Ted Kennedy, Bob Dole, Robert Bird, George Bush (who as V.P. sometimes made appearances as the President of the Senate) and John Glenn.

I was a Senate page for approximately six month during the ninety-ninth and one-hundredth congress in nineteen eighty-six and seven. I was there for the Senate Iran-Contra hearings, Cory Aquino’s address to a joint session of Congress, the appointment of Rehnquist as chief Justice and the appointment of his replacement Scalia to the Supreme Court.

Some of my best memories included taking the subway all around the city. My particular favorite place to go was Georgetown. We lived in dorms that were two floors of the house office buildings adjacent to the capital. The Smithsonian and all the monuments on the capital mall including the Lincoln memorial and the Washington monument were in my back yard. I was paid an annual salary and saved almost a thousand dollars during my time there, though this money was stolen shortly after my return home during a party I had thrown at my parents house.

It is hard for me to talk about the experience as anything more than matter of fact. The most remarkable thing about being a senate page is the way people look at you when you tell them that you were a senate page. For me the experience is more than twenty years old and is just another in a list of stories that I like to tell. But when I see the wide eyes of the people I tell it to, I begin to realize how special that time was, and it makes me appreciate it all the more.

The five pound burrito

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting with some friends at a local taqueria having a few beers when one of then pointed out that the restaurant had recently implemented an eating challenge. The challenge was simple enough eat a five pound burrito (FPB) in an hour. Being a fan of eating shows like “Man vs. Food” I was curious about the challenge and even went so far as to boldly announce that I thought I could do it. My friends were skeptical, particularly because the FPB came with a fiery habanera sauce. To quell their doubts I lifted a small cup of the habanera sauce and downed it in one gulp. Impressed with my tolerance for spicy foods the conversation soon shifted, but the next day I was contacted by one of my friends who said that if I was serious about eating the burrito, he would bankroll the operation. I agreed. A date was set. The challenge was on.

If you haven’t figured this out by now, I am an impulsive person. I frequently say and do things that are spontaneous and have, on occasion, gotten myself into situations that are a bit over my head. One such episode even culminated in getting me thrown out of graduate school, but that is another story. Still, the thing about being impulsive is that I truly believe that I can do the things that I say I can and I generally do not brag or boast simply to puff myself up. My impulsive decision to engage in the challenge was not part of any attempt to put my money where my mouth was. Rather, I believed that I actually could eat the FPB.

Over the next couple of days I spent some time thinking about the challenge. I went to various competitive eating websites and looked at the techniques suggested by people who regularly invest themselves in these sorts of challenges. The recommendations included drinking lots of water and eating water laden fruits and vegetables like cabbage or grapes. Most important of all was not to starve yourself prior to the event. Starvation can cause the stomach to contract and shrink and was not advised.

The morning of the event I went to the gym for a light run. A little exercise, I thought, would build my appetite. Also, I began to psych myself up. I tried to visualize myself eating the burrito including the all important last bite. This wasn’t very hard as I knew that I was going to finish the FPB. After the gym I went to work, taught for a few hours than went home picked up my daughter and drove to the taqueria.

My friends had all talked about coming out in support of the event, but I arrived early and no one had arrived. I ordered the burrito and sat down patiently awaiting its arrival. Slowly friends and well wishers began to trickle in until, by the time the burrito actually arrived, I was surrounded by a fairly good crowd of people.

The actual eating of the FPB was not all that ceremonious. It was shaped like a pizza and was at least four inched thick, filled with rice, beans, lettuce, cheese and of course habanera sauce. I picked up a knife and cut it into three parts and began to devour it. I knew that I had to eat it quickly, before my mind and body began talking to each other and before satiety sank in. I managed to eat the first two thirds of the FPB in about twenty five minutes, and began eating the last third.

A couple of things stand out in my mind about this time, first one of my friends kids kept jeering and poking me which was an almost constant distraction. In all honesty I can’t say if this distraction was good or bad. The other thing that I remember was that at some point around the beginning of the last third, something happened to my taste buds and the actual flavor of the FPB became unpleasant. I have tried to describe this experience to several people, and the closest I can come is to say imagine if someone handed you a urinal cake and asked you to take a bite of it. Imagine what the experience of taking the first few bites would be like. Imagine the revulsion that your body and mind might experience as you felt the substance enter your mouth. Now multiply that by about four pounds of food in your already distended stomach.

Needless to say there came a point where the experience of eating became so unpleasant that I could no longer shovel food into my mouth. I simply could not get the food past my tongue. Every bite, even something as simple as a bite of lettuce tasted so horrible, and felt so poisonous that I could not will myself to swallow it. In the end I stared down at what was probably the last ten bites knowing that I could not finish them. At that point the realization that I was full really kicked in, so I made the only choice I could, I decided to throw up what I could and get rid of it.

In the aftermath of what amounted to my failure, I heard that aside from the one guy that ever finished the FPB, I got closer than anyone ever had. That, at least, was some small consolation. But what some might see as defeat turned out to be a nice afternoon. My friends, gathered around me continued to enjoy the afternoon and soon the party moved to a house and went late into the evening. What started as an impulsive statement turned into an event that brought friends together and culminated in a fun afternoon. By all accounts that in itself is a success.

The aftermath of the burrito is something altogether different. My stomach continues to feel stretched and uncomfortable, and worse, even now, several days later, eating is not a pleasant experience. I suspect that what I really need is several days of stretching and exercise. But really haven’t been able to find the time. I comfort myself in the knowledge that the event brought people together and that despite the aftermath, it was fun. I would never try it again, but I don’t have any regrets.

Unknowing and Uncertainty

Years ago, as a college senior, I wrote a paper entitled “The Erotic Love of Wisdom” in which I discussed three speeches on the nature of love that appear in the first half of Plato’s Phaedrus. The paper was a sort of ad hoc examination of the spirituality that I thought lie behind the famous Socratic statement, “I know that I know nothing.” The paper was poorly received.

For twenty years I have wondered about that paper. I have rolled it back and forth in my mind vacillating between the thought that paper was too far ahead of its time for mere mortals to understand and the thought that I was just a young, dumb kid who really didn’t get philosophy and was lucky that they gave me the “C” and didn’t ride me out of school on a rail.

Recently I began rereading the Vedas. I was struck, in particular by those passages in the Upanishads that talk about a state of awareness known as “dreamless sleep”, to be awake, and aware, but that the mind is so calm, and disciplined that it is as if your mind were as still as someone in a state of dreamless sleep. I like to imagine this state of awareness. The image seems freeing. To be in a state of awareness like one in dreamless sleep means that the mind is not processing everything all the time. The sights, the sounds the sensations of the universe are all taken in the moment. The mind does not distinguish between them: the cry of the bird, the scent of lavender, and the feel of cold stone are all the same. They are experienced without words or thoughts to describe them: bird, lavender, or stone.

I think I still have some of that young, dumb kid inside of me, because I tend to gravitate towards the poetry. But is worth mentioning that I completely ignored the second half of Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus, in which the author turns from the poetry of love and begins a dialectic examination on the nature of rhetoric, the rules of language, literally the art of persuasion. I read the Vedas and I see a world unfolding before me like Krishna revealing himself to Arjuna "an infinite number of faces, ornamented by heavenly jewels, displaying unending miracles, and countless weapons of his power". But there is another side to the dialogue. There are the rules of speech, and the art of doing it in just such a manner if you are going to be successful. It isn’t enough to be passionate; you also have to be disciplined.

This morning I found myself wondering if there wasn’t a correlation between the notion of dreamless sleep, and Socrates “I know that I don’t know.” Probably. The idea of wisdom in ignorance is far flung and appears in many places. You hear Socrates echoed in many western philosophers from Augustine to Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard described it as “learned ignorance.” It is prevalent in eastern schools of thought as well, and you can hear it in authors like Confucius, who writes, “To know is to know that to know is not to know.”

Socrates statement is an affirmation of inquiry. Socrates puts the question to himself what do I know, and by examination comes to the conclusion that he does not know, and that this is the grounds for the one thing that he can definitively say, namely that he knows nothing. From this process, Socrates derives a process, dialectic, that he can then apply to all other forms of knowledge, particularly of Ethics, and demonstrate that other also know nothing.

The Socratic Methodology has been passed down to us through the generations in the form of mathematics and science. The methodologies are the same. A good scientist proposes a thesis, conducts experimentation and draws conclusions, and the voice of Socrates can still be heard in Scientists like Heisenberg, whose uncertainty principle. Seems the very model of Socratic ignorance.

Heisenberg uncertainty principle states by precise inequalities that certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high precision. The more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be measured.

For Socrates much the same exists. The more we come to any kind of certainty, the more we are forced to define that certainty and frame it from our own perspective. As Plato states in the section on rhetoric from the Phaedrus, that the problems of language automatically engender a misunderstanding. Our means to describe phenomena are only as good as the speaker, and since their perspective is subjective and biased, so any attempt at a true description will follow.

Thus we find ourselves always reaching a point were our understanding falters. A good example of this might be proponents of String Theory, a theory of the universe that is so abstract, so settled in the world of Ideas, that there is no physical experiment that can prove its existence. Instead it is described in the world pure mathematics, a language that many people associate with reason and logic. But in this case it is a language that describes a world so unlike anything that we can imagine that logic has become a kind of poetry to the senses and that can convey a meaning or understanding of this world that physical science cannot touch. For Plato, it is the world of Pure Ideas.

Poetry, is seems is the world where knower and known can finally be one, and in which the identity of self and other begins to dissolve away. In many ways it is the same sort of idea that the Upanishads talk about. That it isn’t simply enough to say “I don’t know” but that beneath the idea that I understand that I don’t know is a recognition that any act of knowing does not validate our knowledge of the world, but rather undermines it, and in a way destroys it. The minute you choose speed, or direction, the world becomes a smaller place for knowledge is actually lost and not gained. So that in the end it isn’t the language of knowledge, science or mathematics, that is vital to our understanding of the world, but the language of poetry.

Finally. It is ironic then that Plato dismisses the poet, the artisan and others like them as mere imitators, as he does in his Ion and later in the Republic. For as it would seem, what Plato dismisses as “the divinely inspired” are in fact the guardians of the most profound truths known to human existence.

I chose this

You ever get an idea in your head that seems so familiar that you know you heard it somewhere before, but you can’t place it? I had that feeling driving to work this morning. I can’t even tell you the train of thoughts that lead to the one I arrived at. It might be that the thought simply popped into my head the way errant thoughts sometimes do. I was driving in my Jeep with the radio on. I was listening to the NPR newscaster discussing the events in Egypt. It was warm this morning, or at least, warmer than it has been in a while and I was trying to decide whether or not to roll down the windows, because I was about to get on the freeway and couldn’t decide if I simply wanted a bit of fresh air or the torrent of fresh air that driving with the windows down at seventy miles an hour brings. Anyway there I was, sitting in my car, I think I was approaching a red light, when this stray thought wandered through the window of my mind. It was so tentative, so fragile, like the smell of apple pie coming from the neighbor’s kitchen, or the scent of spring borne on seasonal breeze, that at first I wasn’t sure what to make of it. “What” I wondered, “If in the moments before birth, our souls choose the life we wanted to live?”

There are many religions that talk about the souls experience before life. The Greeks have the reincarnated soul pass across the river Lethe and so forget everything the soul knew in the life before. The Bardo Thodol teaches that once awareness is freed from the body after death it traverses through a series of spiritual tests before it reenters the world in the form of a new birth. I don’t know about any of that stuff. I don’t know if we are born once and live the life we are given, or if we have an immortal soul that that entered and reentered the world for countless eons, in and out of life after life through the creation of universe after universe. For me none of that really matters. All I have is now. But I wonder. Did I choose now? I mean really choose this now, in a time and a place so different from this that words like time and place have no meaning. Did I, standing on the precipice, look out over the whole course of my life, and, like a contestant at a carnival booth, did I reach down into the water and pick this life knowing all that I knew then, that I would have to go through all that I know now?

Now, I don’t know if I read this somewhere, in the Upanishads, for instance, or in the Gita. I probably did, or something just like it. But for that moment in my car, listening to the radio, and feeling the wind on my face, I had this thought and what is more I was so sure of it, so sure that it was true, that I believed it. Probably because that thought, the thought that my life wasn’t the product of God or the Universe or any other force but was in fact the by-product of a choice that I made. Of all the countless lives I could have chosen, I chose this one, because there was something, many things, that this life had to offer that I needed to learn. There is no force outside of myself “doing this” to me, or inflicting this life upon me. Like a college freshman standing in front of an admissions office with a handbook full of electives, this is the litany of courses I chose for myself. Now all that's left is to figure out what to do with it.

We are all Racist

The artist Wassili Kandinsky said “art is the child of its age, and the mother of our emotions.” I often use this quote when teaching to express to my students that art is a language, a language of the time in which it was made, and that by looking at the art we can tell a lot about the time in which the artist lived, his or her beliefs and in general the social and cultural influenced that helped shape the work of art. We art the product of our culture. I tell my students this not only that they have a tool for understanding the art, but that they understand that they are also children of their culture and that as such they will approach the work from a particular standpoint, with a particular mindset that frames the way the appreciate art.

Recently, in our adult Sunday school class, we began discussing the writings of Martin Luther King. Race is one of those big three that they say you should never discuss with people if you want to keep your friends your friends. The other two are religion and politics. So we have our bases covered in church. It is an odd thing listening to people talk about racism. Many times you hear things that, in talking about racism, sound racist. For me it is hard not to judge. I grew up with grandparent who frequently made racist remarks and from whom I learned a great deal about my own intolerance of hate speech. As a result I tend to err on the side of caution and typically react negatively to words that hint at racism. And it is an odd place to sit and talk about racism, in a room full of white, middle class Protestants. There isn’t a person of color among them. So, just as I caution my students, the stetting and our own point of view must be taken into consideration in this conversation.

In talking about the speeches of MLK, we tend to talk about racism in the past. But of course racism is alive and well in the modern world, and perhaps more prevalent today than ever, as undercurrents of racist talk and thinking are swept under the table in a tide of political correctness and affirmative action. But for myself I know that I am a product of my culture, so that no matter how hard I reject hate speech and racist sentiment, I undoubtedly share in them both. We are all racist. Not all to the same degree. But we have heard racist sentiment in our schools and on television and really everywhere. It seems inescapable. About the time I think that I have eradicated every last racist thought that I have heard or been brought up with, another rears its ugly head. No I don’t think that the way to escape the tide of racism is to pretend that I am not racist. They way to avoid becoming racist is to remain vigilant of my thoughts and actions, to remain open to the words of others that might point out when I am at fault and be quick to acknowledge when I am wrong and make amends.

I enjoy the conversations we have in our class, and when I am unable to attend I am disappointed. I tend to think of racism as a fear of change or perhaps, more rightly, a fear of the different or the other. When I look at a person’s clothes or their manners I might think that these people are to be feared or worse, but really it is my own inward fear of the strange and different, my own ignorance about other people and other cultures that are different from my own, that gives my fear strength. The more we talk about racism, the more I think, and learn and grow, and the better equipped I am to deal with my own fears and insecurities. It makes me wonder though, because there is always change and there is always difference, so does that mean their will always be racism? I hope not, but I really don't know.

Defining my Higher Power

I have been having this dialogue about faith. The dialogue takes place in my mind, but is shared by many in my waking life. I have heard snippets in church, and work, in facebook, and from friends. Mostly what they say is the same. To quote al-anon and the twelve steps faith is “improving my conscious contact with God, as I understand him.” I find this answer fairly satisfying because it resonates with my personal spiritual growth. That is, I find that as I grow spiritually my awareness of the presence of God, however defined, grows. I worry thought that my definition of God is somehow tied to the idea of spiritual growth and that perhaps I am being redundant. It is hard for me to think of spiritual growth without God. I find myself asking the question can there be spiritual growth in the absence of God? The closest answer I can come to of an example of spiritual growth without God is in acts of charity or compassion. I say this because I think that a true act of charity or compassion is strongest when it is done without ulterior motive and that it is only a true act of charity when it is done without expectation of reward.

Interestingly the more I think about acts of compassion the more I realize that in practicing compassion I look to God for strength and direction. Perhaps this is why I began asking myself a deeper, more personal question that is dominating this inward dialogue of faith. It is hard to define exactly what this deeper question is exactly, or even how I struggle with it. I think it is safe to say that I am going through a transformation of belief and that I am unsure about exactly what this transformation is or how it will end.

I am, for example, deeply conflicted about various representations of the cycles of the life of the spirit. I grew up being taught that we are born, we live and we die. When we die, if we were good we went to Heaven and if we were bad we went to Hell. As I got older I began to dismiss this idea of an afterlife of duality and decided that heaven was one place, regardless of our actions and that it was our time on Earth, and what we did with it that defined our suffering. Hell was the torment that we put ourselves through on Earth. From there my beliefs took on many twists and turns. Gradually I began to accept the possibility that there was not one life but many. That we didn’t simply live and die, but that this was part of a greater cycle of birth and death. I began reading Eastern philosophies and eastern religions that shared these beliefs, and eventually I began to think that even heaven was part of this cycle of our spiritual lives, that is that we are born, we live and die, we go to heaven for a while, and then it starts all over again. Heaven is just part of the greater cycle of things.

This of course left the question of where God was in all of this and, more personally, what was my roll to be in this ever changing cycle of life. Many religions offer variations on this theme of cycles, and almost all agree that God both permeates and is outside of the circle of death and rebirth. My roll, as you might find in Buddhism or Christian Gnosticism, it to reunite myself with the divine God-head that is outside of this merry-go-round we call life. It is here that I have lived, in my spiritual growth, or perhaps more rightly defined as my spiritual belief. For what I am talking about is not really a way of living rightly with God, as much as it is a search for some definition of God that I can be comfortable with so that I can begin to live rightly with that definition.

Here, finally we come to the crux of the problem. The problem of the question that I asked in paragraph one. “Can there be spiritual growth without God?” The problem with this question being not so much that there is a right or wrong answer, yes there can or no there can’t, as the problem is with the question itself. The problem is not whether or not I can grow spiritually, but whether I can without a definition of God. Can I grow spiritually with my present definition of God? The answer for that question being yes, as long as I don’t define God too rigidly, because if my spiritual growth does not sync with my definition of God, I have, as you can see, conveniently altered my definition to better understand the nature of my growth. This has been useful because belief give me a touchstone upon which I can ground myself. The more I think this way the more I begin to distrust my definitions and begin to wonder if I shouldn’t just throw them all out, or if this isn’t the proverbial throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Still I can’t help but ask myself the question, another question. What if there were no definitions? What if there were just act of compassion and charity in and for themselves? Could I remain grounded in my faith, or would faith dissolve into ego and would I become selfish and self-centered without the presence of some definition of God showing me the way? Sadly I don’t think that I trust myself enough to try and go it alone without my dictionary close at hand. Too often have I been that selfish, self-centered person that I speak of. Still it gives me comfort, in moments of spiritual crisis when my definitions have become rigid and abut my sense of spiritual growth, that it is not God, but myself that I am struggling with, and that my higher power is waiting, patiently for me to come around.

My deep driving desire

Probably everyone knows the famous passage from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, “You are what your deep, driving desire is. 
As your desire is, so is your will. 
As your will is, so is your deed. 
As you deed is, so is your destiny.” As I lay awake near sleep the other night this thought was in my head. Though really the thought was more like “how do I know what my deepest desire is?” you can do a search on the Upanishad quote and come up with a thousand different musing on its meanings, and I don’t mean to do that here, rather as I lay there looking at myself I couldn’t help but wonder if what I desire and what I want are really the same thing.

I was listening to a radio lab episode about a month ago when they tackled a similar problem. In the episode the hosts talked about an experiment in which people were given a simple set of numbers to memorize. The subject was then asked to walk down the hall into another room and recall that set of numbers to an observer. Unbeknownst to the test subject, there was an obstacle in the way. Someone, a research assistant probably was to intercept the subject in the hallway and disrupt the subject’s train of thinking. The research assistant would ask” Would you like a piece of cake?” and then offer the subject a piece of cake. More often than not, the list of numbers was forgotten. It turns out that desire and reason are in a constant struggle for attention, and desire usually wins.

I am what my deep, driving desire is. It is weird to think, but the last thought I had as I drifted off to sleep was. I am that desire. By that, of course, I mean, if you look around at my life, at the people and the stuff that I have surrounded myself with, whatever other choices I might have made in life, these things, these people are the by-product of the decisions that won. My life is a product of my deep, driving desire.

Now I have to tell you that usually when I read this quote I read it negatively. That is, I think that if I really willed myself I could have that good job. I could have fame and fortune and everything that goes with it. Or, more rightly I think that I could have that close intimate relationship with my higher power if only I got my mind right. Did you get that? The reason, I tell myself, that I am not a good person, or a righteous person, or a holy person, or whatever, it that I don’t want it enough, and that if I were better, I would.

Self loathing thoughts like these are the by-product of years of misunderstanding between the Christian God and myself. I can blame the church or the priests or my parents… but those songs are old and tired. No I have worked long and hard to try and get my mind around the idea that God is Love, an idea shared in both the Gospels and the Upanishads. And as I lay there thinking that I am what my deep, driving desire is, and I thought about all the things in my life that I have that I am thankful for, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t my desires that made me a bad person, my desire to have things that I didn’t have, it was my deep, driving desire that made me who I am today, that gave me a wonderful life, and that was a very comforting thought, one that I could fall asleep to.

Letting Go

I have this part of me that loves to get away with stuff, and gets really indignant whenever I get caught. I hate getting caught, though not because being caught means I have to admit fault. No, I hate getting caught because it makes me angry, and that kind of angry is totally irrational. I had this kind of episode last night at my daughters swim meet. I was sitting in someone else’s spot and when they asked me to move I got crazy angry. To my credit, I didn’t show it. I moved, and then I sat in my new spot fuming and hating the woman who asked me for her chair back. It is totally crazy. I mean, any given day of the week I would offer my chair and the shirt on my back to some stranger but for some reason on this night I was hell bent on picking a fight.

It was thinking about the idea that I was picking a fight that made me realize that I have been thinking about this situation all wrong for some time. Usually I get angry and do something stupid and hate myself for getting angry. But really, where is the sense in that? That is like offering a child a piece of candy and then smacking them once they take it. No. If I really want to berate myself for anything it should have been for sitting in someone else’s seat in the first place. But of course that thought didn’t enter my head until much, much later.

When I told my wife about it she remarked that the instant had probably triggered something old, some old memory and that I was but an actor on a stage, rehearsing a part I had learned long ago. Thinking about that I tend to agree with her, but couldn’t help but wonder what was the trigger. It wasn’t getting angry, or for that matter probably not even sitting in someone else’s chair, no I suspect that the event that triggered the whole episode probably started further back, possibly when I first entered the building, or in the parking lot, or even on the drive to the event. The subsequent behaviors, the choosing of the seat, and the rage were all just echoes of a much larger drama that was playing itself out somewhere in my subconscious.

I have been thinking about consciousness a lot lately. Mostly because I have been thumbing my way through the Upanishads. If I had to tell you what the Upanishads were to me, I would say they are meditations on the spirituality of consciousness where consciousness it like a spider’s web. You pluck one string and the whole thing is set into motion. Your mind is drawn, like the spider to its prey, and you find yourself in perfect pantomime going through the same old motions.

You know it is thinking like this that really gets me hating my brain. I think about it like some hateful insect but in fact I suspect my mind is actually trying to help me. We go through motions that are painful and distressing, but most likely we are doing this not so much because we are always doing it the same, but because we hold out the hope of someday doing it differently. Someone once told me that insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. I suppose that were true if we never thought about it and just blindly stumbled along the treadmill. But the insanity stops the moment we stop turning a blind eye, and the harder we look at ourselves, the harder it is to do the things that we do without wondering why it is we do them at all, and slowly, little by little we catch ourselves and stop doing them all together. Last night I got horribly angry, but instead of tearing my night apart I gave up my seat, muttered under my breath for a while, and then let it all go.

Meditation

While jogging at the gym I often times bring my Ipod with me and listen to podcasts. Over the years I have listened to a variety of podcasts ranging in topics from history and science, to talk radio and pop culture. One of my favorite podcasts is of a WNYC radio program called Radio lab. I enjoy the program because it takes fairly complex topics like physics or psychology and attempts to break them down into simple easy to understand terms. Frequently the program will feature interviews from specialists and laymen alike giving the show a kind of “everyman” feel. The other day I was listening to the program titled “Words” in which the show discusses the idea of a world without words. One of the segments featured a neurologist, Jill Bolte Taylor, who suffered a broken blood vessel in her head. The “blood vessel burst inside her left hemisphere, and silenced all the brain chatter in her head. She was left with no language. No memories, just sensory intake.”

As fascinating as her story was, I couldn’t help but compare her experience to descriptions of the meditative state of mind that is often described in the Hindu Vedas and Buddhist texts. “The Sanskrit word véda "knowledge, wisdom" is derived from the root vid- "to know".” They are, at least in my opinion, the record of centuries of reflection by ancient Indian scholars and mystics on the question of the human experience, or, if you will, what is the meaning of life, at least in the way the noted American scholar Joseph Campbell once described it: “People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life... I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

Interestingly, in describing her experience, Jill Bolte Taylor suggested that in losing her ability to ascribe language or words to things, she found herself instead experiencing “an all encompassing feeling of joy.“ Words she suggested, kept her at bay from the world, separate and isolated. When she lost her capacity to ascribe words to things she said she felt closer to them, as if she were apart of all things. I have to admit this idea intrigued me. For in meditation the goal is often to silence the inner chatter, to suspend the “self” and to get one to stop differentiating between self and other. In a sense, meditation is about finding that connection that Mrs. Taylor had thrust upon her. When asked, which did she prefer, the world of silent joy, or the world of words, her response was a quiet “I don’t know.”

For me the idea that the chatter in my head could go silent, that I could rid myself of the little voices that crop up and keep an almost constant running monologue of life seems like a gift too good to be true. While my voices can be sweet and sincere, they can also be insecure and mean. I have often struggled to understand the value or importance of meditation, but this show has given me an insight into the idea that in meditation I could somehow separate myself from that thread of jabbering prattle that follows me wherever I go. I mean, I have often thought about meditating, but really I never understood what it was for. I have to admit I had a kind of “what’s in it for me” attitude. Listening to this show I suddenly found myself with a sense of wonder and direction that has opened meditation to the world of possibility.

“It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.” - Buddha

One of the most common threads in the Vedas is the idea of conquering the "self." You can read yards of pages that seek to describe what this notion of "self" is. There are as many interpretations of the "self" as there are selves making them. However in many of these text to which I refer,the self is the still calm deep that one strives for in meditation. It is the absence of the running monologue, and the opening of the mind to a purely sensory intake of the world of experience. In short, it is the experience described by Mrs. Taylor.

When I was younger I used to think of the "self" as the "soul." But my understanding of what the "soul" is could only be conceived of in esoteric terms. That is, if I had a soul it was somehow something "other" and not really related to anything in this world. I think a big part of my spiritual growth has been to let go of any preconceived idea of "self" or "soul" and rather strive for connection and compassion as a way of experiencing that nature of soul that I could not otherwise imagine. It is a little frightening to think that this notion of "self" is derived from a pure sensory experience of the world. I mean that pretty much puts the esoteric idea of soul out of the picture. No body, no self. No Self, no soul. No soul... what then? Still, part of setting aside my preconceived notions of "self" and "soul" is setting aside the fears and doubts that go along with those old ideas. For now at least I want to try and focus on that feeling of connectedness, without necessarily worrying about what is in it for me.